I've never done anything more than "Hello World" with Rails, but interestingly, I am increasingly getting exactly this feeling with the framework I am using - Grails (groovy based). There are so many syntactic games played to make things look minimalist and cool that it is barely possible to understand anything it does from first principles. The problem with that is that throughout my career I have continually found that to be successful I have to understand things several layers below where I am operating at. There are always unexpected behaviors, bugs, features you don't understand properly that bite you in the process of development. Time and time again it's been the fact that I can dig right into what's going on several layers below that has saved me. I don't really believe that any of these frameworks is so wonderful that this won't be the case in the future, so it makes me very uneasy about this kind of thing.